The poll battle in the country’s youngest state of Telangana is all poised to take off among a set of combatants marked out by their asymmetric stature. The Congress, led by A Revanth Reddy, and the BJP, under the stewardship of G Kishan Reddy, are the main contenders for power from the opposition side. But none of the leaders from either party are a match for Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao, who is more popularly known as KCR.
KCR enjoys a rare charisma and his mastery of the art of public speaking in the native idiom and diction lends him a phenomenal connect with the masses that no other Telangana leader can rival. The BRS supremo’s stature is anchored on his role as the fountainhead of the statehood movement. For his rivals, he now represents a towering figure like Bahubali, the protagonist in SS Rajamouli’s blockbuster Telugu movie, after winning two elections in succession since the state formation.
These two victories have helped Rao emerge as an unquestioned leader within and outside his party. For long, the opposition had appeared decimated and for both the BJP and the Congress, it has been a lengthy struggle to reclaim the opposition space.
KCR Plays His Cards Well
KCR is striving to pull-off a hat-trick as the Chief Minister for the third time, riding high on his government’s landmark welfare and development programmes. The most popular and time-tested of them are the Mission Bhagiratha for safe drinking water, Mission Kakatiya and Kaleswaram projects in the irrigation sector, the Rythu Bandhu farmers’ income support scheme, Kalyana Lakshmi financial assistance for marriages, social security pensions, free residential education for Muslims, and finally the Dalit Bandhu programme.
KCR has ingeniously built a winning caste coalition with a synergy of dominant upper-caste Reddys and Velamas on one side and numerically strong OBCs on the other that literally disarmed his rivals in the previous elections. In addition, the BRS leader is wooing Dalits, who constitute 15 percent of the electorate, with his expensive and most populist Dalit Bandhu scheme which proposes to dole out a staggering Rs 10 lakh for each Dalit family.
Besides, the BRS chief has put up a “secular” face by keeping Muslim minorities in good humour and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM in his company. This, to an extent, has helped him check the growth of BJP with religious polarisation receding to the background as a prime election issue.
Congress Regains Lost Ground
The debacle in the Karnataka elections has led to BJP rapidly losing the plot in the perception battle. The Congress has emerged as the most potent rival to KCR. And the grand old party is heavily banking on anti-incumbency triggered by the 10-year rule of the KCR government.
Unlike KCR’s party which has an incumbent Chief Minister, the Congress and the BJP have failed to come up with CM faces from their parties. The Congress had suffered existential issues after losing power at the Centre and in the Telugu speaking states in 2014. Despite doling out statehood for Telangana, Congress weakened in the next few years due to a massive exodus of cadres from its ranks, including lawmakers, to KCR’s party.
Its “Ghar Wapsi” call is at work now, thanks to the fresh lease of life the Congress has received from its Karnataka victory. As a result, a good number of its old guard began to find their way back into the Congress from the BRS after seeking greener pastures in the ruling party.
Though the Congress is ahead of its rival BJP in building optics in its favour with the help of its win in Karnataka, too many claimants for the CM post and the traditional intra-party faction feuds may upset its applecart. With Revanth as a turncoat from the TDP assigned to head the state Congress, a brewing insider-outsider clash is threatening its electoral prospects.
BJP’s Weak Footing
The central probe agencies appearing to dither on the arrest of K Kavitha, KCR’s daughter, in the Delhi liquor scam, the change of the BJP’s leadership in Telangana from Bandi Sanjay Kumar, a bitter KCR critic, to the milder G Kishan Reddy, and KCR putting on hold his plans to float a third front as an alternative to the NDA at the national level have helped in strengthening public perception that both BRS and BJP adopted a ceasefire to defeat the common enemy i.e. the Congress.
The Congress leadership has begun to highlight this perceived ceasefire, saying both KCR and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are on the same page. Thus, the Congress seeks to be the sole claimant for the anti-incumbency vote.
To Congress’s advantage, BJP has seemingly retreated from its victory claims with its senior national leader BL Santosh predicting a hung assembly in Telangana. The saffron party, despite registering a sterling performance in the national elections in 2019 and in the bypolls at Dubbak and Huzurabad and in the GHMC (Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation) elections, failing to sustain the tempo and ceding ground back to the Congress is a rarity in recent times in Indian politics.
It certainly appears that the BJP is out of the Telangana race. But can Revanth beat KCR or will KCR retain his Bahubali image in a Congress-BRS straight fight? That’s the question voters will answer when they throng the polling booth.
Gali Nagaraja is a senior journalist, formerly associated with The Hindu, The Times of India, and Hindustan Times for over three decades. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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